Content warning: frank discussion of sexual violence
I'm tempted to start this ramble trying to sketch out the shape of every story I want to gesture at, but laying down details feels like it anchors my feelings too specifically. Suffice to say, my mind is turning over once again the fascination of so many of my peers with the Human Domestication Guide, with mechsploitation, with stories of despair and specifically sexual violence visited on women, whether cis or trans. Being a member of the Cohost Writers' Salon, or even just Terminally Online and Kinky while Trans, means I know many a transfemme whose interest in such stories is sexual, remarking about how a crushed soul is hot or what fantasies of horror make them flush. It occurs with such frequency that it's a form of queer identity and community affirmation, reiterating how our desires push us beyond society's comforts and into each others' arms.
It's thus with some anxiety that I confront the fact I only ever range from impotently upset to anhedonically hollow in response to these stories.
I can recognize, of course, that there are degrees to this matter; I play with a friend who feels like she's the sole trans woman who doesn't enjoy pain, and certainly our entire little community was roundly baffled by the existence of a trans woman in her thirties who thought a blowjob was kinky. In some ways, I suspect this is a reification of queer identity, each person marking themself as not really queer through their imperfections just as gender is constructed by people failing to perform it properly.1 At the same time, there are different ways to identify one's imperfections. Where others seem to define themself by a refutation—"these horrors are present to me, yet I do not enjoy them"—I feel as though my experience is orthogonal, an empty failure to resonate. "I recognize these are horrors, but mostly I feel indignant."
I wonder, to an extent, how much of this is rooted in the particular perception of sexualized danger many trans women experience. I'm reminded of one of Otter's stories, "In the Greenwood." It is, quite blatantly, a story about transfeminine people being sexualized, othered, silenced, objectified. Girls are beasts, magical creatures that never seem to speak, kidnapped and held at knifepoint to be fucked or captured and beaten into a facsimile of submission. I remember when the second part was discussed in the Salon, many emotions were had about the crushing despair of girlhood, of the parallels to the transfeminine experience. The phrase one trans woman with sex work experience repeated with the ritual of importance was, "[A trans woman is] a woman you can own. A woman you can own."
As you might expect, I didn't experience that same emotional experience. Equally important, however, my girlfriend—a binary trans woman, complete with tragic backstory and retail employment—didn't share those emotions either. I can feel the shape of something happening here, even as I struggle to place it.
My thoughts draw a line between the response to "In the Greenwood" and bæddelism2 (aka trans-inclusive radical feminism). A brief introduction, for those unfamiliar: radical feminism is specifically the claim that oppression is essential to womanhood, and womanhood essential to oppression. In other words, to oppress is to make someone a woman, and to be a woman is to be oppressed. This, obviously, makes the ontology of "woman" rather critical to feminist analysis. Trans-exclusive radical feminism attempts to root this oppression in biology: reproduction, the capacity thereof, and the labor of performing it (both physically and socially). Thus, trans women cannot be women, for they cannot give birth, while trans men remain women because they theoretically can. Ignore the mental gymnastics required to also affirm the womanhood of infertile or otherwise non-reproducing women.
Bæddelism, meanwhile, roots all oppression specifically in transfemininity – to be oppressed is specifically to be a trans woman, and all other forms of oppression in turn derive from transmisogyny. Others have written more about how bæddelism rose and fell; what I want to focus on here is its lingering presence online. Most notable to me is how TMA and TME—acronyms for "transmisogyny affected" and "transmisogyny exempt"—persist in many an online trans woman's vocabulary. These are, quite blatantly, terms that at best have very specific functionality and at worst are used to erase the differences between cis men, cis women, trans men, and (depending on who you ask) nonbinary people in service of positioning trans women as The Most Oppressed. Despite this, posts still circulate about how "TMEs" must wait hand and foot on trans women to make up for transmisogyny. The idea that trans men experience distinct and important forms of oppression—referred to as "transmisandry" or "transandrophobia"—is derided and compared to the Men's Rights Activists of yesteryear. While bæddelism may no longer persist as a coherent movement, there remains an undercurrent online that the known statistics of transfeminine experience (rates of sex work, abuse, assault, rape, stalking, online harassment, murder) place all trans women in a uniquely vulnerable state.
It's with this context in mind that I can't help but see, if not a self-victimization, at the very least a pervasive emphasis on vulnerability in transfemme spaces. Some fear it, others sexualize it, but the perception of violence (and especially sexualized violence) comes to saturate many spaces until it fills the air invisibly. So it is, presumably, that horror harbors these subgenres of transfeminine erotica. To adapt a quote from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, "We can do terror and philosophy, and we can do terror and arousal, and we can do all three concurrent or consecutive, but we can't do philosophy and arousal without the terror. Terror is compulsory."
This all feels terribly dangerous to claim, however. There's a risk of coming off as saying, "Well, sure, trans women have it rough, but are you really all that vulnerable right now?" And, to be fair, in some cases I would genuinely say such words! There are a great many trans women who, amid the growing normalization of transitioning (marked by the transition of Caitlyn Jenner), managed to maintain well-paying jobs even as they overturned their personal lives. There are plenty of trans women who coast on their parents' good will or have more savings than I could ever dream of, yet still perceive themselves as perpetually under threat of being disappeared if their vocal training slips for an instant. While they're certainly as vulnerable to a knife in the dark as the rest of us, there's a certain impracticality to this fretting that can infuriate me. Despite this, I also recognize that everyone is feeling the precarity these days, no matter their income. Us Americans, perpetually the loudest voices in the room, are all one medical emergency away from a lifetime of insurmountable debt. The pendulum of politics continues to swing conservative against LGBT+ rights around the world. When viewed that way, it's hard not to feel the terror of it all.
My other suspicion, then—at least for me, someone whose anxiety and depression are all too eager to fixate on the horrors of life—is that a critical disjoint also occurs for me in my experience of sexuality. To identify as asexual is, as I've discussed before, to experience an inherent friction around sexual attraction compared to those surrounding you. This friction makes it difficult for me to make the jump between chasing physical sensations and the social/emotional context of a relationship that seems to drive so much of the allosexual experience of sex. It wouldn't be surprising if this same friction also made it difficult to (as Freudians would likely say) sublimate my traumas, fears, and anxieties into my libido.3
I think, then, this constructs a working theory of why so many transfemmes seem to find community over the fetishization of sexual violence. Awareness of transfemme risks & statistics produces terror and an inclination towards victimhood. Allosexuals then process those feelings through sex, sexuality, and fiction. Break any step in the chain—ignorance of vulnerability, rejection of holding the fear, friction around sexuality, or any other version of refutation—and this intertwining of horror and arousal collapses. While neither may dissipate, they do not blend as they seem to for this particular class of transfemme.
For my action item, I think I just need to get better about not reading stuff that I know will leave me distressed and hollow inside. Maybe some day I'll even write something that can take its place.
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See Judith Butler's Gender Trouble for more discussion on gender anxiety & its relation to gender construction/reification. ↩︎
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Bæddelism comes from a proposed etymology for the word "bad," which suggests it may come from "bæddel," meaning an effeminate man. Whether "bæddel" was also used to describe people we might now consider trans women is unknown, and as I understand it there are at least 3 competing etymologies for "bad." Despite this, the screenshot of a Google-supplied etymology drawing the line from "bæddel" to "bad" circulates, and it remains a huge red flag for me. ↩︎
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One could argue that the recurring theme of "control" in my kinks belies a sublimated ur-anxiety over my life's choices and how I feel sole responsibility for how my life goes, but well. I think I'll save that for a potential footnote if/when I write my thoughts down about horny TTRPGs, smut, and transferable arousal across kinks. ↩︎
